The bittersweetness of life

Bittersweet: adjective; Sweet with a bitter aftertaste. Arousing pleasure tinged with sadness or pain.

This word, bittersweet, has been floating around my head since I’ve landed in Colorado. It was a word that came to me a lot as I was preparing to leave this state over seven months ago. It only makes sense that my return to this beloved place would evoke the same sensation; sweet with a bitter aftertaste or pleasure tinged with sadness. Both resonate deeply with me.

Returning to a place that felt like home after a long absence is often going to hold this confusion of bittersweetness. Part of me knew this was coming but wanted to ignore the inevitability of it. I wanted to forget the bitterness that may come and only focus on the sweet. I have realized that it is not possible to always separate the two and in fact, they often compliment each other beautifully.

Life is constantly handing us moments of bittersweet. The endings that herald in new beginnings. The heartbreaks that teach us the most beautiful lessons. And the hard goodbyes that remind us of the precious hellos it began with. Life itself is almost always bittersweet if we are paying attention. Bitter without sweet is overpowering for our senses but so is sweet without bitter.

It made me get curious about how often I have ignored the beauty of the bitter bits of life. The moments that sting more than we want them to. It is so easy to quiet this part of life in hopes of making more space for the sweetness. Because in a perfect world, everything would feel sweet…right?!

I believe we put too much value into how sweet life should feel. We are spoon fed this idea that life should always feel good if we are doing it right. That a good life is a happy life and a happy life is a pain free life. But have you ever tried to eat dessert for every meal for an entire day? Sweet loses its appeal after a meal or two. Without the contrast of a savory meal with bitter, salty, sour, and umami flavors, sweet isn’t quite as delicious.

Contrast is required in life but that doesn’t always make it easy. Feeling so torn over my return to Colorado is not easy to digest. On one hand, I feel so grateful to be back in the mountains I love and have the ability to connect with so many of my incredible friends. But the other hand holds a poignant reminder of why I felt called to leave. It is a stark reminder that I no longer have stable roots here and in fact, don’t have a home at all. It is hard to balance these two sensations. This knowing that I love this place but also this knowing that perhaps it will never be my home again feels too full of tension to hold.

I had this idea in my head that as soon as I landed back in Colorado that I would know whether or not this was still my home. I was hopeful that I would feel overwhelmed by only sweetness or only bitterness. Of course, the decisions I have to make in the future would be a hell of a lot easier if this were the case. Unfortunately all I’ve gotten is this intense bittersweet sensation.

Wouldn’t life be so much easier if bittersweet didn’t exist?! If we only had the capability to feel one emotion at a time rather than the nuanced spectrum we often hold?! But again, I must come back to this idea of contrast that has haunted me the past seven months. Life requires contrast. The paper must be white to clearly read the black writing. There is no way out of this fact. The challenge is to learn how to find the lesson in both sides of a situation.

The bitter taste in foods is actually incredibly important for digestion. Bitterness triggers our body to produce more saliva and other digestive juices in our GI tract. It initiates the digestive process so we can break down and absorb everything else better. Sweetness in food often means it is calorically dense aka it gives us a lot of energy. So the bitterness helps us to absorb the energy of the sweetness. Talk about the perfect pair!

If we ignore the bitter aspects of life, perhaps we wont be able to digest the sweet bits quite as well. If I didn’t feel uncertain about my return to Colorado, I probably wouldn’t appreciate the time I have here as much. I have learned over and over that joy can only be fully experienced after traveling through the deepest depths of suffering. Have I mentioned the idea of contrast and how necessary it is yet?!

So for now, I will stew in the bittersweetness of it all. I will continue to get curious about what the bitter is teaching me as well as the sweet. Rather than denying half of my emotional landscape, I will honor it all as valid. Life is hard. Coming back to a place I loved to call home without having a new home I love is hard. I’m still very much in the messy middle of figuring out what this all means for me aka I don’t have the ability to wrap this up in a neat little bow, yet.

Part of me, of course, is grateful for the bitter and the sweet. For being able to hold space within myself to feel it all. For the growth that has allowed me to return here with curiosity and compassion. And lastly, for being able to sit in the unknown of it all without squirming…too much!